Emerald Software was a video game publisher founded in 1988 by two UK entertainment executives – David Martin of Martech, and Mike Dixon who previously worked with EMI and worked as the company CEO. The company was headquartered in a three-story Georgian house ("Washington Lodge") in Wilkin Street, Waterford, Ireland. The ambitious company made a very promising start, but a number of critical delays in the development program eventually led to its closure in 1991. People The company was mostly populated by graduates or placement students from the then-named Waterford Regional Technical College – with some from University College Dublin and others with no formal computer training. At its peak, Emerald Software employed 17 programmers and 5 graphic artists. These people were spread across 5 departments, loosely split to cover each of the supported development platforms and graphic art – with two additional personnel in Administration and Human Resources. Development The company authored games for the Commodore Amiga, IBM PC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC systems. Development for Amiga and Atari ST games was carried out using Manx C, and Motorola 68000 Assembly language. As both Amiga and ST were 68000-based machines, games were typically authored on the Amiga and then ported using an in-house authored porting / remote-debug / development environment; this allowed the code to be edited on the more capable Amiga, then transmitted to the ST and remotely executed/debugged from the Amiga. The development system was written by Brian Kelly and was based on Lattice C. Graphics and sound routines required re-authoring, but in many cases this was straightforward. The Amiga games did not run on top of Workbench/AmigaOS – but on a custom-written tiny OS (KOS) with a proprietary disk format which offered higher data capacity per diskette, as well as helping to impede casual copying. This was written by Brian Kelly (the K in KOS). Development for Spectrum and CPC games took place on a commercially available cross-assembler development environment (PDS) hosted on an IBM PC clone which was connected to a Spectrum. This allowed the game to be authored on the stable PC environment (complete with disk backup), then "blasted" directly into the Spectrum memory to allow for immediate testing. Developing in this manner allowed for significantly higher development speeds than could be achieved by native development on the Spectrum. As both ZX Spectrum and CPC 464 were Zilog Z80-based